1997 Readers' Choice Awards: Games/Edutainment

Game

Galactic Civilizations II
by Stardock Systems

Phew! The Galactic Civilizations saga continues as Stardock's biggest hit, earning winner's spot for the second year in a row (last year it was the original Galactic Civilizations that won). Galactic Civilizations pits the user against alien races driven by a fiendishly clever artificial intelligence. Colonize planets, develop new technologies, build ships and pick your destiny, from galactic peace to domination to annihilation.

This sequel adds even more to the original game, with more technologies, more ships, bigger universes and an even higher level of addictive gameplay than ever.

Links for OS/2
by Stardock Systems

Stardock's port of Links to the OS/2 platform brings the world's most advanced Golf game to OS/2 users. Using DART and DIVE technologies in OS/2, Links lets you play on world famous courses and enjoy the stunning detail of each on your home PC. Best of all, all those courses developed for Microsoft Golf and Links 386 (.CRH files) can be played on the OS/2 version too.

Edutainment or Multimedia Application

QuickMotion
by Practice Corporation

Last year's winner too, QuickMotion brings an ability to OS/2 that had been sorely missed by many: the power to play QuickTime movies (.MOV files). QuickMotion accomplishes this not by creating a new application for users to install on their systems, but by seamlessly integrating QuickTime support into existing OS/2 multimedia software.

QuickMotion contains a complete QuickTime engine, with support for all QuickTime 1.0 video decompressors. Plus the engine is completely transparent, so it allows the latest movie players (such as IBM's multimedia video plug-in for Netscape Navigator) to play QuickTime movies. QuickMotion also provides seamless support for Windows-style AVI movies thanks to the free registration of AnPoCODEC it includes.

WarpAMP
by The Software Developers Guild

WarpAMP, based on the AMP decoder engine developed by Tomislav Uzelac, et al., is a fast PM player of digital music files compressed using the popular MPEG technology. WarpAMP has a compact interface, complete with a digital "CD Player" look, playlist (with the ability to edit song info and append them to your files), scrolling song titles and streaming support so you can play files while they're still downloading from the Internet.

The Software Developers Guild has some ambitious plans to improve the OS/2 market by writing high quality apps which it feels OS/2 users are lacking. With WarpAMP as a first showing, it's definitely on the right track.

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